Millennial Life Crisis

Last week, I made my boss make a phone call for me because professional phone calls to people I don’t know really make me nervous. I was sweating and got the little black spots in my sight. So he came into my office and put it on speaker phone and did all the talking. He didn’t fire me. He should have because I’m pathetic. Email only, please. I realize this is a medical issue and I should seek help because IT IS JUST A PHONE. BUT I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO USE THE LANDLINE I DON’T THINK. This story is irrelevant to the rest of the post, but I just got vulnerable with you so now I feel like you, reader, are a friend. WELCOME.

As a young woman of twenty-two years old, I have learned many life lessons including but not limited to:

straightening your hair every day for four years will ruin your curl pattern

microwaves cannot cook everything properly

if a boy is not okay with you saying “no” then he isn’t worth it

don’t get into cars with anyone who has been drinking

walking on train tracks is a crime

if someone tells you a hard truth and sits with you and helps you through processing it, they care about what happens to you

Shonda Rhimes will always kill your favorite characters.

admit to not knowing something instead of trying to muddle your way through it

The most shocking lesson is also the one I have to keep relearning. And it hurts to relearn:

I am my own person.

It sucks.
The older I get, the harder this lesson is to ingest. I think I am allergic to it. I try super hard to avoid that truth. I really don’t want to have all of the control of my decisions. It is a lot of pressure. If I’ve been doing anything this year, it has been resisting my own authority over my life, and it has caused tension and frustration in many of my relationships.

For example, I have tried endlessly to push my life back on to my parents. I have asked them to tell me what to do, where to go, how to do it and when they give me answers I don’t like or are not encouraging in the way I would hope, I get mad. Yes, I AM AWARE OF HOW IMMATURE THAT IS. I’ve started to develop healthier boundaries, no worries. Twenty-two is weird, nobody told me I would need to make boundaries between me and my parents i thought that would come naturally with age like it would just kick in

I’ve been ashamed of the process for awhile because I have not felt like I had the room to be both/and. I did not think it was healthy of me to be a professional adult in the working world, fully capable of doing my job and discipline others if I was also learning how to become my own person. But I can do and be both. I can teach others while also discovering how to better my own methods of discipleship, communication and leadership. In my weak spots, I still think I need to hurry up to become the final product of who God designed me to be and who I want to become. That’s false though. Wouldn’t that take away from the His glory? Isn’t He most proven through our faith journey and not our destination?

God’s authority is over all things, including myself, but I need to own up to my obedience and my choices under His jurisdiction. So here I am. Millennial Life Crisis. Learning how to become my own. That’s what I hope this new writing experience will be – a way to document the messy process of owning up to my own person.